A LOST MAN.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XI, Issue 105, 21 April 1876, Page 4

A LOST MAN.

A Franco-American farmer, O. Antell Goolie, located near Joliet, in the State of Illinois, has; had a narrow escape. The farmer lives in an Eastern country of Illinois, adjoining the State Indiana, and bis part of the country is nearly all under corn, the tallest and most fructiferous possible of conception. The celebrated maize of Texas, which rises to such a height that " a Coraanche Indian, standing on the head of a giraffe " is invisible among the stalks, must be considered as a dwarfish cereal by the side of the gigantic grain of Illinois; and as for the cornfields of that favored State, thay appear to surpass in extent the celebrated works of the Down East manufacturer, who boasted that be had twenty-seven miles, of cotton mills. On a recent Saturday morning M. Good lie set out to visit a brolher-in-law, who resided about five miles from his farm/ Suoh'at least was the distance from the turnpike road; but there was a short cut through the cornfield, and that route the French farmer determined to take. He set out and for an hour walked, on;, but a terrific storm of thunder and lightning arose, the heavens were darkened, the rain fell in torrents, and the farmer lost his way amidst that which bad been converted from a rolling prairie of gold into a slushy jungle. The corn was here, the corn was there, the corn was all around; but not a land mark, not even as much as a scareorow was visible to point out the way to the belated traveller. His legs sack almost to the knees in the black porous earth, and he was wet to the skin. At length night arrived; M. Goodlie cut down with a clasp knife enough corn — it was his own corn, mind, so he was liable to no indictment either for theft or trespasB — to make him v bed, and, exhausted by fatigue, he fell fast asleep. He appears to have slumbered through the whole of Saturday night and the whole of Sunday, and it was not until dawn oil Monday that he awoke to find that he and the corn had both dried up, and that he was uncommonly hungry and thirsty. Presently the sun rose, and he resumed bis trackless march, when to his great joy, his feet stumbled on a small hillock. Ascending this gentle but sufficing acclivity, he took a survey of the surrounding prospect, and to bis amazement and delight discovered that he was within five minutes walk of bis own bouse. And yet M. Goodlie calculated that he had travelled at least thirty miles — it must have been in circles — on that memorable Sunday.